“When you surround yourself with lunatics, after a while, you become a lunatic too”
A sentence like that gets in. Weeks later you hear it in your own voice, argued with feeling, as though you earned it somewhere.
Every writer carries firm verdicts about adjectives, readers, and what they are allowed to attempt. Yet few can say where those rules came from.
They arrived and stayed.
The verdicts you never examined are the ones choosing what you write next.
